samar-may-2016Samar Al-Bulushi
I am currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University. My doctoral dissertation, Citizen-Suspect: Publics, Politics, and the Transnational Security State in East Africa, explores the relationship between transnational governance, militarized urbanisms, and Muslim middle class subject formation in the context of Kenya’s growing role in the US-led  ‘War on Terror.’ I employ the term ‘citizen-suspect’ to theorize the urban Muslim minority citizen as someone whose rights are legally enshrined, but whose participation in public life is increasingly subject to transnational regimes of surveillance, suspicion, and violence. The dissertation explores how the gendered and racialized hyper-visibility of middle class Muslims becomes embodied, and how surveillance and suspicion shape the substance of participatory politics. Funded by the Social Science Research Council, the Henry Luce Foundation, and Yale University’s MacMillan Center, I conducted fifteen months of ethnographic research in the Kenyan cities of Mombasa and Nairobi between 2013-2015.

My work has been published by Transforming Anthropology, The Guardian, Africa is a Country, Jacobin, and Pambazuka.